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peekabot is a distributed real-time
3-D visualization tool for robotics researchers and developers, written
in C++. Its purpose is to simplify the visualization needs faced by a
roboticist daily—using visualization as a debugging aid or making
fancy slides for a presentation, for example.

Our goal is to provide a flexible tool that will cater to the
vast majority of a roboticist's visualization needs, yet is easy to
use. Typical scenarios include visualization of simulations, data display
from real robots and monitoring of remotely deployed robots.

...to enable remote data visualization, peekabot uses a distributed
client-server architecture. All the gory details of networking is handled
by the client library, used by your programs.

peekabot's low-level control of actions allows for some very advanced
scripting, such as the object pathing shown here.

A number of Blender-created models allow for some snazzy active
objects, available freely on the Web.

Installation

Head to the Web site, and grab the latest tarball. In terms of library
requirements, the documentation helpfully states the following (note, in
the list below: *not
required when building only the client API; **needed only if building
the unit tests, which are disabled by default):

Assuming all went well, when the compilation has finished, you can run
the program with the command:

$ peekabot

Before we jump in, I have to warn you that we've covered only half
the equation. peekabot is made of two key parts: the server and its
clients. After the initial building process, you will have the
server by itself. The server is the main GUI screen where you'll be
testing and interacting with your client programs. The clients
generally will be standalone programs that communicate with the peekabot
server while following their own coding structure. Although this may be
daunting for new users (me included), it does make the system very open,
powerful and flexible.

Okay, I'll assume you have the server window open and are ready to
take peekabot for a spin. Let's take a look at a working example program
and explore the GUI while it's running.

Open another terminal in the peekabot source directory, and look under
the examples folder. Here you will see the folders bo-slam, results and
skeleton. Enter any of these folders, and run the command
make. After
make has compiled each example's code, a new program will be available
in the same directory. To use bo-slam as an example, here's the terminal
commands to enter (we'll assume you have a folder open in the peekabot
main folder):

$ cd examples
$ cd bo-slam
$ make
$ ./bo-slam

Run by itself, nothing will happen, and you will get a bunch of error
messages in the console. However, when started with the peekabot server
running alongside, a robot and a bunch of pylons will appear, with
the pylons moving themselves around the world into position and the
robot making its way around each pylon on a preprogrammed path. Okay,
now that we have something running, let's explore the GUI.

The main window contains the scene you'll be working with, along with a
camera whose point of view is adjustable. The left mouse button will pan
the camera, and the right button will rotate it. To zoom in and out,
use either the middle mouse button or the mouse wheel. If you need
the camera controls to be more or less sensitive, the Shift and Ctrl keys will
modulate the sensitivity accordingly (useful in extreme close-ups or
when looking from very far away, for example).

On the right is the Tree Browser, which contains all the active
objects, scenery elements and so on. You can select objects in view
by left-clicking, and multiple objects can be combined selectively
like any file manager, using Ctrl to toggle select and Shift to add to
the selection.

Ultimately this looks to be a powerful project for robotic visualization,
albeit a rather intimidating one. Despite the relatively difficult
learning streak from its mostly coding-based interface, it's probably
this same kind of interaction that will bring it longevity. Not having
the restrictions of GUI design to hold back the mechanics surely
will be a godsend to those who want to approach their mechanical design at a
low level without the restrictions that accommodating to beginners
so often imposes.

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